[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131

[Josiah Carlson]

"Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 
> On 5/24/07, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:
> > Where else in Python have we made the default
> > behavior only desired or useful to 5% of our users?
> 
> Where are you getting that statistic? This seems an extremely
> backwards, US-centric worldview.

Stephen Turnbill's rough statistics on multilingual use in Emacs...
"""
And that's a big "if".  Most of your users will not see code in a
language the current version of your editor can't deal with in their
working lives, and 90% won't in the usable life of your product.  That
I can tell you from experience.  Emacs has all these wonderful
multilingual features, but you know what?  95% of our users are
monoscript 100% of the time.[1]  90% of the rest use their primary
script 95% of the time.  Emacs being multilingual only means that the
one language might be Japanese or Thai.  If 99% of your users
currently use only ISO-8859-15, that isn't going to change by much just
because Python now allows Thai identifiers.
"""
    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-May/007887.html

Which I 'poorly extrapolate' to users who write source using non-ascii
identifiers...
"""
Why?  Primarily because ascii identifiers are what are allowed today,
and have been allowed for 15 years.  But there is this secondary data
point that Stephen Turnbull brought up; 95% of users (of Emacs) never
touch non-ascii code.  Poor extrapolation of statistics aside, to make
the default be something that does not help 95% of users seems a
bit... overenthusiastic.  Where else in Python have we made the default
behavior only desired or useful to 5% of our users?
"""
    http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-May/007927.html

Apples and oranges to be sure, but there are no other statistics that
anyone else is able to offer about use of non-ascii identifiers in Java,
Javascript, C#, etc.


 - Josiah